Oncology and narrative time

Mary-Jo Del Vecchio Good, Tseunetsugu Munakata, Yasuki Kobayashi, Cheryl Mattingly and Byron J. Good

Social Science & Medicine, 1994, vol. 38, issue 6, 855-862

Abstract: Oncologists encounter the uncertainty of time horizons in their patients' lives. Although American oncologists are given a cultural mandate to instill hope in the therapeutic narratives they create with patients, uncertainty leads them to expressions of time without horizons or of time with highly foreshortened horizons as they seek to create for patients an experience of immediacy rather than of chronology. The distinctiveness of the American pattern is highlighted through comparison with Japanese exemplar cases and stories of therapeutic practices in oncology. Concepts drawn from narrative analysis of temporality and the construction of the therapeutic plot are employed.

Keywords: oncology; therapeutic; emplotment; narrative; time; biomedical; cultures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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